Can your company’s business rules, buried in the code of your applications,
give you a competitive edge? They can if you’re able to update them quickly
in response to market needs. JRules provides a quick response suite of tools
to develop and manage business rules as a task separate from developing applications
that might want to apply those rules. A rule, such as the complex pricing formula
of something the enterprise offers for sale, can thus be specified and maintained
separately from code that handles database, Web traffic, ordering screens formatting
and so on.

Extracting the rules from the code offers only a theoretical advantage if
manipulating the extracted rules is itself difficult, however. Easy manipulation
is where JRules excels. Headquartered in Gentilly, France, Ilog understands
that the business side of a company must be able to talk to the IT side. Thus,
it has specialized the JRules interface to handle three roles: policy manager
or business owner, business analyst and developer. This allows the businesspeople
to manage the rules directly rather than having to translate them to the IT
side—with the inherent loss of precision that dialogue historically
produces. Another plus? Improved regulatory and international standards compliance.

The Unify NXJ 10 suite is undoubtedly the fastest way to develop Java business
applications today. Its drag-and-drop tool suite enables developers to paint
screens quickly, populate them with database fields, and specify the computation
of calculated fields. NXJ 10 comfortably handles complex, multiscreen interfaces,
multiple-database transactions and advanced user interactions with aplomb.
The Sacramento, Calif.-based company’s product generates all the Java
code, JSPs, JavaScript and HTML you need, as well as all deployment and configuration
files. In addition to the basics of business programming, NXJ 10 offers advanced
services to enable application integration, business process management and
portals. With these high-level components, programmers can generate virtually
any Java business application in record time—without writing a line
of code.

Headquartered in Vienna, Austria, Altova is no stranger to the Jolt Awards.
The company’s Xmlspy development suite has long been a trusted asset
in many developers’ tool chests, and has received two Productivity Awards.
But Altova never rests on its laurels, now producing Mapforce, its maiden voyage
into the XML mapping tool market. In addition to performing visual XML-to-XML
mapping, Mapforce also includes an innovative database-to-XML mapping feature
that can generate Java, C++ or C# code (complete with a Visual Studio solutions
file). The generated code executes a database query and transforms the data
into an XML document that matches the specified output schema. This feature
comes in handy because the majority of such information resides in relational
databases.

When it comes to visual data modeling and handling integration chores, I was
impressed with San Francisco–based Embarcadero’s DT/Studio. The
studio comprises the Java-based DT/Engine, a Java-based DT/Console and a Windows-hosted
DT/Designer. The engine handles the actual data transformations that you create
visually using DT/ Designer. The designer deftly handles source and target
mapping activities, and is also useful for reverse-engineering complex data
warehouses. Support for a wide range of databases is included, as is an impressive
array of extensible data transformations for handling type conversions, date
and time math, and financial functions. DT/Studio’s considerable power
is both accessible and customizable through a variety of wizards and a useful
macro facility.